They Are Rare

Junior dev's daily struggle: facing three principal engineers in standup while trying to explain why your "quick fix" broke production. The mental gymnastics of convincing yourself you're the "extraordinary genius" while they pick apart your code that clearly violates every best practice known to mankind. Yet somehow, in your head, it's not even close—you're revolutionizing software development one undefined variable at a time.

The classic resume inflation algorithm at work! What's funnier than watching someone transform the mundane task of screwing in a light bulb into what sounds like they single-handedly revolutionized NASA's illumination infrastructure. The deployment terminology is particularly chef's-kiss - as if changing a bulb involved CI/CD pipelines and a Kubernetes cluster. And let's appreciate the "zero cost overruns" metric... because spending $2 on a light bulb is definitely within budget parameters. Next time you update your LinkedIn, remember: you didn't just fix a bug - you "architected and implemented a mission-critical exception handling framework with 100% resolution rate."

The eternal dev team cycle of pain: You fix a bug and submit a PR, then sit there refreshing GitHub like Pablo Escobar waiting for someone—ANYONE—to review your code. Meanwhile, the project manager is wandering around wondering why features are still stuck in QA purgatory. Classic chicken-and-egg problem where nothing moves because everyone's waiting for someone else to do their part first. The circle of software development hell that transcends programming languages and team sizes.

The corporate hierarchy of bug fixing, illustrated as a chess game where nobody actually knows what's happening. The intern is confidently saying "Yes" (they fixed the bugs), the team leader is asking "What code?" (they don't even know what codebase needs fixing), and the senior developer who originally asked the question is responding with a flat "No" (because they know better than to believe anyone). It's the perfect representation of software development chaos where the person with the least experience is the most confident, and the person with the most experience has completely given up on expecting competence. The circle of technical debt is complete!

Behold! The ultimate software engineer personality test that's more accurate than any Myers-Briggs nonsense! I'm DYING at "The Optimistic Estimator" because we've ALL been that delusional fool promising miracles in "2 days max!" only to still be debugging three weeks later, questioning our life choices. And don't get me started on "The 'Actually' Specialist" - that monster who waits until AFTER you've deployed to production to smugly inform you why your approach is fundamentally flawed. The AUDACITY! 💀 Personally, I fluctuate between "The 'It Depends' Guy" and "The Pragmatic Pessimist" - multiplying estimates by 3 and STILL delivering late is basically my toxic superpower at this point!

When your PR shows "-9,953" lines of code and your manager gives you a thumbs up. Nothing says "senior developer" like knowing what code not to write. The most efficient code is the code that doesn't exist. Somewhere a project manager is frantically updating their burndown chart while wondering how to report "negative progress" to stakeholders.